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If only Siegfried Kircheis were here

@official-kircheis / official-kircheis.tumblr.com

Siegfried | 20 | he/Admiral | The Barbarossa
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The Church of Scotland will have to close hundreds of churches in the coming years, the Kirk's trustees have warned as it stages its annual General Assembly. [...]
The Kirk said having more than 1,000 churches to cater for the number of people attending was "simply untenable and unsustainable". [...]
According to 2021 numbers, the church has 283,600 members - down from a peak of 1.3 million in the late 1950s. [...]
Each church averages just one wedding and one baptism per year - about 1,200 in total.
There were 50,000 per year in the late 1950s.
There were 430 professions of faith in 2021 (sometimes referred to as confirmation) compared with 40,000 at the peak of new members in the 1930s.

Massive W for Scotland

lmao show this to the theists who were claiming the UK was "still very Christian" the other week

The average age of those attending church is 62.
[…]
The vast majority of ministers are over the age of 50 and could retire in the next 10 years.
The church said this was putting lots of pressure on existing ministers to cover vacant parishes in addition to their own.
St Kentigern's in Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire, has been without a full-time minister for more than seven years.

if this isn't already an organisation that has completely lost its relevance to society and position as a nexus of power, it will be before the end of the century at the latest. praise darwin.

hm, ok that's good news, but, yknow.. if we run out of priests before we run out of kings, how will we hang the last of the second with the guts of the last of the first 🤔

well, there's only the one king at the moment but many priests, so it seems fine. but the number of kings is increasing at an alarming rate! up more than 100% since last year.

Anonymous asked:

japan prime Minister assassination attempt thought?

I don't know, something like the main thing keeping even public figures like politicians from being murdered isn't explicit security arrangements (bodyguards etc) as much as people don't really want to murder all that much?

Kind of an infohazard though because if more people start thinking "murder is easier than you think" they might want to do more murder.

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The planetary science people are probably correct that categorizing objects based on orbital characteristics isn't very useful. I feel that Metzger et al. makes a variety of unconvincing arguments, though. Like they argue to begin with, it shouldn't matter what the historical classification system was. Which means it doesn't matter if people get the history wrong. So it's not clear why they spend so much time debunking bad historical theories to make their point. It distracts from the central point of the paper.

Metzger and Stern do seem to be launching a counter-offensive though to the IAU definition from it though, so maybe we'll get to see a war of the planetary scientists vs. observational astronomers over Pluto in the next decade or so.

see also the Hubble tension, if you adopt a certain eminent cosmologist's views on its possible origin

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Yeah, I guess the whole field just sort of has this same flavor, it's like the infamous paper where a medical researcher discovered a new approximation technique and apparently no one in the peer review process knew enough calculus (or read the paper closely enough) to say "hey, isn't this just the trapezoidal rule?

Only an anecdote, but when I was an undergrad, one of the grad students in astronomy gave a talk on the current progress on their research and revealed that one new thing they had learned recently was that you can tell how fast an object is moving away from you by measuring the hydrogen spectra. Which is true, but also a very basic thing that any physics undergraduate would learn as part of a sophomore level modern physics course, so it's somewhat concerning that a PhD candidate in astronomy wouldn't know it, and wouldn't be know enough about it not to be embarrassed to proclaim this to a room that was about half physics undergraduates like it was some esoteric secret only they knew.

Butt I've personally encountered too much stuff like this, there's just a baseline level of physical knowledge and data analysis that don't seem to be there in astronomy? Some of them do take a few more advanced physics classes or maybe even do their undergrad degree in it, but it's clear that that knowledge isn't applied in any systematic way to their research. And it's clearly an oversaturated field already, so I feel there's no risk in having physics cannibalize the whole field and purge or re-derive all the methods and ideas that aren't grounded in physical reasoning.

they had learned recently was that you can tell how fast an object is moving away from you by measuring the hydrogen spectra. Which is true,

but… how… like… this is so foundational to cosmology cosmologists measure distances in amount of redshift… how can you get into an astronomy phd without hearing about that?

pony who is relentlessly mocked for being a blank flank well into adulthood so she invites her bullies to a dinner and as they feel themselves grow faint eating in the room adjacent to her gas stove they realize all too late that her cutie mark was carbon monoxide

Antblr

🐜 ᵃⁿᵗ⁷¹² ᶠᵒˡˡᵒʷ ᶠᵒᵘⁿᵈ ᵃ ˢᵘᵍᵃʳ 🐝 walter-wasp Follow Nice i am going to eat it i think :3 🐜 ᵃⁿᵗ²⁷³⁶ ᶠᵒˡˡᵒʷ ᵏʸˢ 🐜 ᵃⁿᵗ⁵⁴⁷⁶ ᶠᵒˡˡᵒʷ ᵏʸˢ 🐜 ᵃⁿᵗ⁷⁵⁴³ ᶠᵒˡˡᵒʷ ᵏʸˢ 🐜 ᵃⁿᵗ¹⁵⁹⁶ ᶠᵒˡˡᵒʷ ᵏʸˢ 🐜ᵃⁿᵗ¹²⁸ ᶠᵒˡˡᵒʷ ᵏʸˢ 🐜ᵃⁿᵗ⁷¹⁹⁶ ᶠᵒˡˡᵒʷ ᵏʸˢ ² ᵇᶦˡˡᶦᵒⁿ ᵐᶦᶜʳᵒˢᶜᵒᵖᶦᶜ ⁿᵒᵗᵉˢ

But I will say! “Chaos and confusion would be kept at bay through a series of conference calls” is not completely encouraging? I get it, if you have a big uncertain event you want to keep lines of communication open and make sure everyone stays informed. But just getting everyone on the phone periodically can also be a way to generate chaos. Ideally you’d be like “chaos and confusion will be kept at bay through a series of carefully tested fixes that can be deployed automatically, but we’ll do conference calls to make sure it’s all going fine.” Leading with the conference calls makes me a little nervous.

Remember what Wildbow said would've happened if Taylor had failed the Leviathan dice roll and died:

Setting aside that I would have chuckled and guffawed and dropped the serial so hard, can you imagine it though. If Taylor's story had ended with a looney tunes circle closing on Mr Gladly's hurr durr assclown face. What the fuck does he say. What does he say, Wildbow. Mr G doesn't remember who this crushed exoskeleton girl even is. She wasn't popular. I'll tell you what he says. He says, "Welp, that was awkward. That Leviathan sure did a number on you! ...he's right behind me, isn't he?"